Imagine Time Chasers if its plot entailed not time travel but alligator smuggling, if its cast had far less investment in what they were doing, if the chase scenes were even more cheap and stupid, and if it induced Z-grade celebrity actors to somehow embarrass themselves—in this case, Michael Berryman (Captain Rixx from the TNG episode "Conspiracy"), Antonio Fargas (TV's Huggy Bear), and Joe Estevez, who of course is reason I watched this.
And our leads? The oft-confused Bill Pullman and Bill Paxton. This movie's actually a helpful mnemonic for those of you who have trouble remembering which is which: who'd make a better head-in-the-clouds neurologist vs. who'd make a better corporate shark?
Pullman is the neurologist, Rex, whose livelihood is threatened by shady goings-on involving his old college buddy turned plutocrat, Jim (Paxton). Soon, Rex's very sanity is on the line; he begins to experience hallucinations after agreeing to perform experimental brain surgery on a company drone (Cort) who knows too much.
It's still an engaging, sorta creepy haunted-castle kind of movie. It features a solid story, overall avoidance of the most tired horror cliches, and a memorable antagonist. I just wish it had dispensed with the bad taste.
Challenge: Make a Warlock sequel that's simultaneously more boring and more batshit than its predecessor.
As the title implies, the protagonist cop (Laurence Fishburne) goes deep undercover to try and bring down a chain of coke dealers. Along the way he partners up with a lawyer (Jeff Goldblum) working for one of his targets, and the lines between crime and justice begin to blur, as they are oft wont to do. Before long he's facing down Latin American druglords and corrupt senators, though sadly without any McBain-esque one-liners or defenestrations.
The early part of the film also establishes the songs' weakness and the too-numerous animal sidekicks, most of whom don't speak and therefore are weakly defined as characters (beyond the standard attributes of "wacky" and "fun"). Of course, since they thought it would be a good idea to give the one speaking animal role to Eddie Murphy, perhaps we should be thankful that the other animals didn't talk.
I'll wager there are better, and less offensive (on multiple levels), representatives of the "cheap action film with a stuntman actually given a lead role" genre available on Netflix Instant than Body Armor, an adolescent tale of one man's struggle against a villainous big-pharma-industrialist and his plot to unleash fearsome viruses so he can sell the vaccines. Body Armor is the Netflix/home video title, though in its original made-for-cable state it was called The Protector, and neither title suits it very well. Here, then, are some ideas for better, more medically-themed titles:
The Infector – which would put more emphasis on the one mildly interesting character, the villain.
Blood Vengeance – as in, the action scenes have blood, and he's got a virus in his blood; see what I did there?
Critical Attack – as in, how we might expect film critics to respond.
Lethal Strain – as in, sitting through it is such a strain, I wouldn't recommend trying if you have a heart condition.
Feel free to use all of those, movie. Obviously you don't care what people call you.
And now, another one from my "I Put It Off So Long that It's Probably a Little Past Its Freshness Date" movie pile.
The prospective viewer should know that Dark City is not so much a noir film (despite its visual palette) as it is a mysterious sci-fi/fantasy film. That sentence probably gives away too much, but a fan of noir who dislikes films that delve too deeply into the realm of the fantastical will be disappointed with Dark City. However, the inverse is also true; I'm only mildly fond of noir but I liked Dark City more than either true noir or Dark City-esque films like The Thirteenth Floor and The Matrix.
Structurally, the film reveals just enough at just the right times to maintain the right balance of interest and confusion. Had it tried to be more opaque—for example, had it omitted the shot of the weird creature during one of the early chase scenes—it might have kept me from guessing as much about the explanation as I did, but it also might have turned out too plodding.
Well, I said I wasn't gonna watch any more Hellraisers. So what are we doing here exactly? What strange appeal do these adequate-at-best movies have that keeps me (and presumably enough audiences to justify eight sequels) coming back? Is it the hint of a vaster and more mysterious mythology than what we see in the first three movies? Is it the hunch that these villains have not yet attained the heights of scariness that they're capable of?
If either of the above are the answer, then I'm definitely done after the abysmal Hellraiser: Bloodline, the fourth installment in the franchise. Really, in my case, I think what's kept me vaguely curious enough to make it this far is the non-Cenobite cast members. I watched Hell on Earth for Terry Farrell, and learned a short time ago that Bloodlines has Adam Scott (Ben on Parks and Recreation and the Defiant's helmsman in Star Trek: First Contact). As it turns out, he dies quickly, but not before getting a few slightly entertaining scenes.
Crackerjack tells the timeless tale of a gang of terrorists being outmaneuvered and eventually defeated by a lone Cop on the Edge—our titular "Crackerjack," Jack Wild (I can't decide which of the character's names is more ridiculous). Crackerjack makes for a cracking dull protagonist as portrayed by Thomas Ian Griffith, whose career seems predominantly defined by soaps. (The hair is kind of a dead giveaway.)
The setup is that McClane Crackerjack has come to L.A. Colorado from New York Chicago for a vacation with his estranged wife brother's family. His nemesis is a smiling East German terrorist played by Alan Rickman Christopher Plummer. They engage in spirited banter and taunting over walkie-talkies while the L.A.P.D. Marines (who initially don't trust our hero when he calls them from inside Nakatomi Tower the ski lodge) bungle an attempt to save the hostages. In the end, not even the villain's long-haired assault-weapon-wielding male models can save him from defeat.
If MST3K were still on, this would belong on it. The performances are continually laughable, the plot is dumb without being agonizingly slow, the corny synth score actually sounds lifted from Merlin's Shop of Mystical Wonders, and the superfluous nudity would be easily edited out.
Sometimes you notice an unexpected similarity between two very different works that you happen to consume around the same time; when I re-watched Sneakers recently, I had just finished reading Jeremy Rifkin's The End of Work, a once-controversial book from the mid-'90s concerning inevitable changes in the world's economies as a result of ever-more-efficient automation. (Short summary: most people will lose their jobs, and we have to move beyond the entire notion of jobs ASAP, or huge and enduring economic disaster will ensue.) I'm no economist and I rarely read this sort of thing, but the book was tough to put down in spite of its often encyclopedic feel—largely because I like to think about all the ways in which the world has changed since recent technologies came along. Rifkin only mentions the Internet once, yet his book, remarkably, isn't very dated at all. In much the same way, and for some of the same reasons, 1992's Sneakers isn't as dated as I feared it would prove to be when I re-watched it. I guess we have Wikileaks and Anonymous to thank for that—or maybe they have movies like this to thank for their own conception.
Horror films can be fun, or scary, or sometimes both. Really great horror can either focus on one (The Shining) or aspire to both and succeed (Evil Dead II). Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth was trying for scary, to be sure, but the efforts at "fun" were so imbalanced that I remain unsure how much of it was intentional. And while I'd be lying if I said I didn't have any fun during Hellraiser III, the problem was that those moments were clustered largely toward the end, and failed to fully compensate for the earlier tedium.
Like the first movie, Hell on Earth introduces us to a single relatable character (Terry Farrell, Deep Space Nine's Dax, playing a TV reporter) and a broadly unpleasant supporting cast. Most unpleasant of all is the rich nightclub owner J.P. Monroe (Kevin Bernhardt, who my spidey-sense tells me has edited his own Wikipedia page). Monroe acquires a mystical pillar containing Pinhead (Doug Bradley) and one of those puzzle-boxes around which the first two movies revolved. Naturally, they don't stay in the pillar for long (though considerably longer than we viewers might expect/wish). The carnage that eventually ensues surpasses either of the previous films, and the justification for Pinhead's much more active lifestyle here seems to be that, at the end of Hellbound, Pinhead's essence was separated from that of his original human self, WWII officer Eliot Spencer. Thus, without the moderating influence of Spencer, Pinhead's much more Pinheady, I guess.
Ah, '90s ensemble dramedies. I've seen so many of you, and you are all so similar, that it takes getting through half of one of you before I can tell whether or not I've already seen you specifically. The only way I could have been more confused on this point while watching Ron Howard's The Paper would have been if one of the Three-Name Marys was in it (e.g. Mary Stuart Masterson, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, Mary-Louise Parker, etc., and if you're planning to start a '90s-style alt-rock band, yes, you may call it Three-Name Marys.)
Indeed, I wasn't completely certain I'd seen The Paper before watching it the other day until I got to the Jason Robards scene, close to the end. That probably doesn't reflect too well on the story.
Generations may be the toughest Star Trek film to review. Maybe that's why I picked it first. (Don't worry, I'm sure a ranty J. J. Trek review is just waiting to come out of me.)
It's tough because there's a lot to like here, yet there's so much to question and doubt. As you'd expect, Trekkies seem to disagree strongly about this one. (I may be the biggest Trek fan I know, but I'm no full-on Trekkie. I have, however, witnessed Trekkie debates in online contexts.) Some like it while admitting its shortcomings; others consider it at least as bad as V—or TFF, as Trekkies probably refer to it, to prevent confusion with V.
On that spectrum, I'd have to count myself near the middle. I find watching Generations to be an exercise in frustration and tedium punctuated by moments of Trekly goodness.
I'll start with the good:
If you've ever played The Sims, you should probably see The Thirteenth Floor, if only to make Sims jokes throughout. Whether you actually enjoy the film at all is highly dependent on your aesthetic preferences and your patience. It's competent enough, but The Thirteenth Floor suffers from a few major flaws and some of the minor flaws that can nevertheless prove to be persistent irritants in a high-concept sci-fi film.
We start off meeting an old guy named Fuller who's a user in a fully-immersive VR world with a 1937 L.A. setting. He delivers a letter to a Sim bartender (the always-welcome Vincent D'Onofrio, with terrible hair) and returns to the real world, only to get killed. Douglas, his friend and employee, is our protagonist (played by Craig Bierko, who's a vat-grown fusion of George Clooney and Brendan Fraser, but drained of charisma); he immediately begins investigating the mysterious murder, which unsurprisingly involves delving into the unsurprisingly dangerous and experimental VR machine. (They call this process "jacking in," a phrase already dated by 1999.) Douglas soon runs afoul of an unsurprisingly no-nonsense LAPD detective (Dennis Haysbert of Allstate ad fame, and get this, his character's name is McBain). A beautiful woman with a secret (Gretchen Mol) unsurprisingly appears, the plot unsurprisingly thickens, and our hero unsurprisingly discovers that all this time he's been living In a World Where Nothing Is What It Seems. Unsurprisingly.
